Nihilism and Nāgārjuna

This was a tweet storm:

Jan Westerhoff makes an interesting point. Any assertion of nihilism is effectively a restatement of the liar's paradox: 

On the Nihilist Interpretation of Madhyamaka

Madhyamaka philosophy has been frequently characterized as nihilism, not just by its Buddhist and non-Buddhist opponents, but also by some contemporary Buddhologists. This characterization might well …

https://www.academia.edu/44962255/On_the_Nihilist_Interpretation_of_Madhyamaka

The statement "Nothing exists" is itself existent - if a statement can be said to exist, which is moot. Still, nihilism per se is incoherent. This also resembles a restatement of the Cogito argument of Descartes. 

Language games like "nothing exists" are not part of the paramārtha-satya "ultimate reality" because language itself is not. Language is samvṛti-satya. So are language games metaphysics? Are any metaphysics possible in language in this view? Not really. 

Westhoff uses this argument to defend Nāgārjuna: he cannot be a nihilist because nihilism is incoherent. Assuming all the while that Nāgārjuna *is coherent*. Is he, though? 

Westerhoff persistently uses the Kātyāyana Sūtra argument that "astitā and nāstitā don't apply to the loka" as though it is a form of metaphysics. But this is clearly wrong. 

In this context, loka means "the world of sensory experience". WRT sensory experience, *of course* existence and nonexistence don't apply. How could they? This isn't metaphysics, it's an assertion of the supremacy of epistemology over metaphysics. 

One cannot claim to know that for which there is no means of knowing. For example, the Theravāda 'bhavaṅga-citta' is defined as an unconscious mental state. There is no way to know that bhavaṅga-citta exists because it can never be experienced. Its existence is assumed ad hoc. 

OTOH, there *is* a state (an episteme) in which there is no sensory experience, no content. In Pāli we call it suññayāvihāra "dwelling in the absence [of sensory experience]." 

In this state, in Buddhists' terms, no dharmas arise or cease. The state obtains when all conditions for sensory experience are absent. It is thus a mental state without conditions (asaṃskṛta-dharma). 

Nāgārjuna fundamentally mistakes this episteme for a noumenon, an ultimate realty. And for this reason, *all* his ideas are incoherent because they are based on making an axiom from a misperception. 

From a contentless (experience-less) episteme, N reasons that reality is contentless: i.e. reality is characterised by the absence of sense experience. Absence (śūnyatā) is reality. It has no content but is not nothingness. 

It follows that sensory experience, all of it, is an illusion which disappears on "awakening". Which makes "awakening" the opposite of waking from deep sleep. 

Thus, for N, the world of objects, events, agents seems real but ultimately it is not real.

Note the subtle difference between saying "nothing exists" and "reality is empty of existence". 

TBF to N, we have to allow that his argument revolves around a particular, all or nothing, definition of "real". To be real is to be self-existent (svabhāva) and to have no other necessary condition. And this state is necessarily permanent. 

And of course, *nothing* that can be experienced can meet this criteria for existence or reality. Hence, *nothing is ultimately real*. Which is similar though not exactly equivalent to "nothing exists". 

The old Buddhist argument (the Kātyāyana argument) is that nothing in experience is permanent so metaphysical terms like existence/non-existence don't apply to experience. 

Prajñāpāramitā insists on this: if you have any mental activity whatever, that is *not* emptiness. So if you think "this is emptiness" it isn't. In emptiness there is no sensory or cognitive experience. 

N takes the absence of sense experience as reality. And in this reality, by definition, there are no objects, events, or agents. There is no space, time, movements. His metaphysics is a metaphysics of absence. 

Moreover, language is not part of ultimate reality. So arguing about the meaning of a proposition like "nothing exists" is pointless in N's view. An assertion in language says nothing about reality in any case (so Westerhoff's use of this trick is voided). 

To all intents and purposes, Nāgārajuna is a nihilist at heart. For every phenomenon presented as evidence of existence, he says it does not *really* exist. 

But N is a religieux, a theologian rather than a philosopher. He cannot abandon his soteriology - his hope of being saved from suffering. And in order to allow for saving, for karma, for awakening (to nothing), he bifurcates the world into conventional and ultimate. 

This allows N to act like a normal person when it comes to morality, for example. To say that morality is necessary. But it also allows him to say that in the final analysis there is no morality. 

And this schizoid view is, in fact, not new. We see the split in early Buddhism between the necessity of personal continuity in morality (you reap what you sow; actions have consequences) on the one hand, and anātman on the other (no self) on the other. 

Anātman and dependent arising say there can be no real personal continuity, even for a moment. But this destroys karma and morality and makes awakening impossible. 

This split between morality and metaphysics is apparent 2000 years later in all modern Buddhist doctrine that I've come across. But stark in Nāgārjuna.

The poor bugger tied himself in knots and then wrote a poem about it. 

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